Advancement of digital imaging technologies have provided consumers unprecedented convenience in capturing, editing, and manipulating hardcopy and digital images. Inexpensive hardware and software tools are now available to allow ordinary consumers to digitize an image on a hardcopy media such as a reflective print or a photographic film, store the output digital image in a computer memory media, manipulate and edit the digital image, and reproduce the digital image using a digital printer. The commercially avaliable digital scanners and digital printers now have such high resolution and high bit depth for each color plane that a consumer can easily reproduce a hardcopy image to achieve an image-quality level similar to the original image print. The ubiquitousness of this capability, however, has posed a threat to the protection and enforcement of the copyrighted images created by professional photographers.